Online Store Ratings

Best online store ratings are available from comparison shopping engines and opinion sites. Using online store reviews and ratings is one of the most overlooked ways in reducing online fraud and a way to make people more comfortable shopping online. The review sites are usually operated by independent companies that do not interfere with the customer reviews and don't make rating enhancements to advertizers.

Store rating has its roots in off-line world: we all would like to hear opinions about particular shops and products before purchasing such items from the stores. Only, in Internet time, there can be well over 100,000 opinions that you can read on one shop.

To make things easier, the review sites have introduced an overall score meter, which gives you a quick look into how dependable the online store really is. Then, by reading a few month's worth of opinions, you can get a quick feel on whether there are any particular problems with the store in addition to the overall rating.

When these online store ratings are combined with the information on lowest prices, this combination becomes a powerful tool.

And that is exactly what comparison shopping engines are. There are now scores of these site around, with most offering price/store information on a wide variety of products across categories.

There is one weakness using comparison shopping engines. The engines in these sites only have information on participating online stores. Most big brand retailers don't co-operate with the comparison shopping engines, as customers surf to their sites directly (and are, in many cases, willing to pay premium for the particular brand).

Therefore, many of the online stores reviewed on the engines are less well known types or brand new stores.

Online Store Ratings - Opinion Sites

Opinion sites don't offer price information and instead concentrate on providing the best and deepest analyses on particular topics.

From online store review perspective the best opinion sites are those that offer online store ratings only. There are not many of those around, with ResellerRatings.com being one of the few existing ones.

This site is an excellent way to rate stores that are not in the comparison shopping engines. You can leave your positive/neutral/negative comments on store after registering for an account at the site.

The site has been going a bit of transformation in recent years after the original founder re-acquired the firm back in March 2002 (he founded the company in 1998).


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